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Showing posts with label MVNO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MVNO. Show all posts

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Neutral Host Networks - Announcing July 9th Workshop on a key industry trend

One of the most interesting trends at present is the reinvention of "wholesale" in various parts of the telecoms and computing industry. Often rebranded as multi-tenant or open-access, there are growing parallels between a whole set of areas I'm following:

  • Neutral Host Mobile networks (more on this below)
  • Open-access fibre (longhaul & metro)
  • Shared spectrum bands
  • 3rd-party cell tower providers (and also ducts and poles)
  • Colocation data-centres
  • Public cloud PaaS / IaaS
  • Multi-tenant NFV platforms
  • 4G / 5G MVNOs & network-slicing
  • Hosted telephony, UCaaS & cPaaS
  • eSIM and multi-IMSI SIM cards
In other words, the technology world is getting much smarter about sharing assets and access, while maintaining - or improving - competition. Telcos, IT companies and enterprises often cannot justify the risk and capital involved in having dedicated - and possibly replicated - facilities. There is no point in every business having its own datacentre, or every mobile operator building its own tower on a given hilltop. 

Sharing - and some form of neutral / open / wholesale intermediary service provider - often makes more sense. Regulators are recognising this in many domains as well.

I've written & spoken about the mobile angles on this for a while - I've covered MVNOs in the 5G era (link), shared spectrum for private mobile networks (link) and open-access fibre for backhaul (link). I've also watched the evolution of small cells and related business models for many years - I first met ip.access in 2001.

Neutral Host Mobile (NHN) fits directly into all of these trends. I'm seeing huge interest in organisations building multi-tenant mobile networks in locations that the normal MNOs cannot address for economic or practicality reasons. In-building, metro densification, rural and road/rail-side use are prominent examples. 

The idea is that an NHN builds a network (with or without its own local spectrum), and the other companies either roam onto it, or used its shared facilities for their own radios.

This has got huge attention, especially with the rise of CBRS in the US, and the realisation that 5G will need lots of small cells, especially in cities. Sharing some or all of the infrastructure makes sense, at least theoretically. It also ties in with edge-computing, MVNOs and various of the other wholesale/hosting models I mention above.

So I'm running one of my periodic small-group workshops on NHNs, on July 9th in Central London. As usual, I'm doing it with a colleague - this time Peter Curnow-Ford of Viatec Consulting.

(I've previously run workshops on the Future of Voice, Telco-OTT Services, Private Cellular, AI for Telecoms, Blockchain for Telecoms, and 5G+MVNOs)

If you're interested in attending the public session, the full details are on this page (link)

Alternatively, if you are interested in a private workshop or deeper advisory engagement, please drop a message to information  at disruptive-analysis  dot com
 
 

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Book now! MVNOs + 5G + Network-Slicing: Small-group Seminar & Workshop, London, 4th December

NEW: 5G, MVNOs, Mobile Wholesale & Network-Slicing Workshop

On December 4th 2018, Dean Bubley will run a small-group workshop in London, covering one of the most interesting topics in telecoms technology and mobile business models: 

What does 5G, NFV & Network-Slicing mean for MVNOs & other wholesale models? 

The day will have a maximum of 25 attendees to ensure a high level of discussion and interaction. 

Expect a diverse mix of telcos, MVNO/E/As, network vendors, software developers, regulators and other interested parties such as enterprises, IoT specialists, investors and consultants. It is suitable for C-level executives, strategists, product management, marketing functions, CTO office, analysts and regulatory affairs specialists.

The event is being run together with partners Mobilise Consulting (link)

The workshop will run under Chatham House rules (link), to allow candid & confidential discussion, without external attribution of comments to individuals or their employers.


It will cover:
  • Technology, including 5G New Radio, New Core, network-slicing and NFV/cloud
  • Business models, spanning consumer, enterprise & IoT markets
  • Regulatory and economic aspects of both 5G and MVNO domains

We'll be highlighting our current thinking - and outstanding questions - on topics such as: 

  • When should MVNOs expect 5G networks to launch & become important? What  changes, compared to 4G?
  • What needs to be done NOW to align with future 5G/NFV wholesale models?
  • Can existing "full" MVNOs with 4G cores upgrade and integrate easily?
  • What's happening with 5G smartphones & IoT devices? What new / different relationships are needed with OEMs?
  • Is “network slicing” really an evolution of today’s wholesale and MVNO model? 
  • What 5G use-cases hold the most promise for wholesale: fixed access, mobile broadband, massive IoT or low-latency / ultra-reliable?
  • Are 5G standards bodies, regulators & vendors giving enough (any?) thought to the needs of MVNOs? 
  • Will we move from a 2-tier MNO/MVNO model, to a 3-tier Infrastructure / Network Service / Tenant model? How would that change the role of today’s full MVNOs and MVNE/As?
  • Will 5G mean more enterprise, IoT and vertical MVNOs? 
  • What are the impacts of changing 5G spectrum & wholesale regulations? What new areas that policymakers should consider?
  • Will we see hybrid MNO/MVNO/WiFi operators? 
  • What are the main consumer 5G use cases for MVNXs? Will it enable more video streaming, AR/VR, gaming or other applications? Or just more data?
  • Will the new 5G core network architecture make a difference?
  • What changes to service provision, billing and QoS will impact MVNOs with 5G?
  • Where do neutral-host networks (eg for in-building or rural coverage) & private 5G networks fit in to the story?
  • Along with 5G, what does NFV, SDN, cloud-native, eSIM and edge-computing mean for MVNOs?
  • Will we see new charging/rating models with 5G or will it be much the same as 4G?
  • Will it be possible to be a 5G-only MVNO?
It is probably too early to give definitive answers to all these questions - but the workshop will cover all these areas, and certainly outline the gaps in today's knowledge, wholesale enablers and regulation. 
The workshop will take place at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, central London [link]. It will run from 9am-5pm, with plenty of time for networking and interactive discussion. Come prepared to think and talk, as well as listen – this is a “lean-forward” day. Coffee and a nice lunch are included. A full agenda will be circulated nearer the time. 

The workshop facilitators will be Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis, plus Hamish White & Amr Houssein of Mobilise.


Booking & Payment

There are PayPal Buy Now buttons below, which can accept card payments as well as PayPal transfers. Alternatively, contact information at disruptive-analysis dot com if you want to be invoiced directly, and use purchase-order & bank-transfer. Payment can also be made in EUR or USD.

Pricing for attendance:

  • Early bird £499+VAT booked before Nov 1 (now expired)
  • £699+VAT after Nov 1
  • 15% discount for 2 attendees booked at the same time (max 2 from any one company)
  • (UK VAT @20% must be charged to attendees from any country, as the service is delivered in the UK. There are two separate payment options below, as PayPal only automatically adds VAT for UK accounts




UK Payments:



Non-UK Payments:



Saturday, February 25, 2017

A Core Problem for Telcos: One Network, or Many?

In my view the central question - maybe an existential dilemma - facing the telecoms industry is this:

Is it better to have one integrated, centrally-managed and feature-rich network, or several less feature-rich ones, operated independently?

Most of the telecoms "establishment" - operators, large vendors, billing/OSS suppliers, industry bodies - tends to prefer the first option. So we get notions of networks with differentiated QoS levels, embedding applications in-network with NFV and mobile edge computing (MEC) and perhaps "slicing" future 5G networks, with external customer groups or applications becoming virtual operators. There is an assumption that all the various standards are tightly coupled - radio, core network, so-called "telco cloud", IMS and so on. Everything is provided as a "network function" or "network service" in integrated fashion, and monetised by a single CSP.

It's not just the old guard either. New "non-establishment" approaches to managing quality also appear, such as my colleague Martin Geddes' views on clever and deterministic contention-management mechanisms (link). That takes a fresh look at statistical multiplexing.

Yet users, device vendors and cloud/Internet application providers often prefer a different approach. Using multiple network connections, either concurrently or being able to switch between them easily, is seen to help reduce costs, improve coverage and spread risks better. I've written before about using independent connections to create "Quasi-QoS" (link), especially in fixed networks with SD-WAN. In mobile, hundreds of millions of users have multi-SIM handsets, while (especially in IoT) we see multi-IMSI SIM cards that can be combined with roaming deals to give access to all mobile networks in a given country, or optimise for costs/performance in other ways. Google's Fi service famously combines multiple MVNO deals, as well as WiFi. Others are looking to blend LPWAN with cellular, or satellite and so on. The incremental cost of adding another connection (especially wireless) is getting ever lower. At the other end of the spectrum, data centres will often want redundant fibre connections from different providers, to offset the risk of a digger cutting a duct, as well as the ability to arbitrage on pricing or performance.

I have spoken to "connected car" specialists who want their vehicles to have access not just to (multiple) cellular networks, but also satellite, WiFi in some locations - and also work OK in offline mode as well. Many software developers create apps which are "network aware", with connectivity preferences and fallbacks. We can expect future AI-based systems to be much smarter as well - perhaps your car will know that your regular route to work has 10 miles of poor 4G coverage, so it learns to pre-cache data, or uses a temporary secondary cellular link from a different provider.

There are some middle grounds as well. Technologies such as MIMO in wireless networks give "managed multiplicity", using bouncing radio signals and multiple antennas. Plenty of operators offer 4G backups for fixed connections, or integrate WiFi into their same core infrastructure. The question then is whether the convergence occurs in the network, or perhaps just in the billing system. Is there a single point of control (or failure)?

The problem for the industry is this: multi-network users want all the other features of the network (security, identity, applications etc) to work irrespective of their connection. Smartphone users want to be able to use WiFi wherever they are, and get access to the same cloud services - not just the ones delivered by their "official" network operator. They also want to be able to switch provider and keep access - the exact opposite of the type of "lock-in" that many in the telecoms industry would prefer. Google Fi does this, as it can act as an intermediary platform. That's also true for various international MVNO/MNO operators like Truphone.

A similar problem occurs at an application level: can operators push customers to be loyal to a single network-resident service such as telephony, SMS or (cough) RCS? Or are alternative forces pushing customers to choose multiple different services, either functionally-identical or more distant substitutes? It's pretty clear that the low marginal cost of adding another VoIP or IM or social network cost outweighs the benefits of having one "service to rule them all", no matter how smart it is. In this case, it's not just redundancy and arbitrage, but the ability to choose fine-grained features and user-experience elements.

In the past, the trump card for the mono-network approach has been QoS and guarantees. But ironically, the shift to mobile usage has reduced the potential here - operators cannot really guarantee QoS on wireless networks, as they are not in control of local interference, mobility or propagation risks. You couldn't imagine an SLA that guaranteed network connection quality, or application performance - just as long as it wasn't raining, or there wasn't a crowd of people outside your house. 




In other words, the overall balance is shifting towards multiplicity of networks. This tends to pain many engineers, as it means networks will (often) be less-deterministic as they are (effectively) inverse-multiplexed. Rather than one network being shared between many users/applications, we will see one user/device sharing many networks. 

While there will still be many use-cases for well-managed networks - even if users ultimately combine several of them - this means that future developments around NFV and network-slicing need to be realistic, rather than utopian. Your "slice" or QoS-managed network may only be used a % of them time, rather than exclusively. It's also likely that your "customer" will be an AI or smart application, rather than an end-user susceptible to being offered loyalty incentives. That has significant implications for pricing and value-chain - for example, meaning that aggregators and brokers will become much more important in future.

My view is that there are various options open to operators to mitigate the risks. But they need to be realistic and assume that a good % of their customers will, inevitably, be "promiscuous". They need to think more about competing for a larger share of a user's/device's connectivity, and less about loading up each connection with lots of QoS machinery which adds cost rather than agility. Nobody will pay for QoS (or a dedicated slice) only 70% of the time. Some users will be happy with a mono-connection option. But those need to be identified and specifically-relevant solutions developed accordingly. Hoping that software-defined arbitrage and multi-connection devices simply disappear is wishful (and harmful) thinking. Machiavellian approaches to stopping multi-connection won't work either - forget about switching off WiFi remotely, or connecting to a different network than the one the user prefer.

This is one of the megatrends and disruptions I often discuss in workshops with telco and vendor clients. If you would like to arrange a private Telecoms Strategic Disruptions session or custom advisory project, please get in touch with me via information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com.